A main goal of enterprise systems management is to provide reliable, secure and efficient information technology (IT) services to support business operations. Knowing the actual currently implemented state of IT assets (including, for example, networked servers, workstations, printers and other mobile devices), including their presence, configuration, vulnerabilities and dependencies is a cornerstone to proactive infrastructure planning and control. Hence, considerable effort is put into maintaining accurate documentation of this knowledge. However, the size of large enterprise IT infrastructures and changing business requirements have ever been challenging the efficiency of manual change tracking processes.
Although the physical location of IT assets is crucial for system administration, financial accounting and IT estate insight, any information on physical location information is typically encapsulated within Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) application protocols and thus non-trivial to discover. Hence today, the physical location of IT assets is often manually maintained in inventory catalogs that are updated through help-desk/desk-side and server-room manual change tracking, complemented with periodic wall-to-wall inventory processes.
However, the efficiency of such processes is challenged in large scale enterprise environments particularly with respect to the omission of documentation updates, increasing workstation mobility, distributed enterprise facilities, virtualization, multiple administrative domains and restricted facility access. These problems typically lead to incomplete or outdated information and further render inventory efforts tedious and costly.
Whilst radio frequency identification (RFID) sensor network solutions have been proposed to automate IT asset location tracking in the past, these approaches require extensive sensor infrastructure to be installed to cover enterprise facilities. Moreover, they rely on the instrumentation of target devices with receiver/emitter hardware which limits the localization scope to authorized devices.
An alternative proposal is to leverage existing wireless local area network (WLAN) infrastructure and use signal characteristics of in-place wireless network interface cards for positioning (see, e.g., P. Bahl and V. Padmanabhan, “RADAR: an in-building RF-based user location and tracking system” in Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM, Tel-Aviv, Israel, 2000). The latter approach does not necessarily require target device instrumentation, but localization scope is limited to devices that have the required hardware and actually connect to the wireless network.
For global geo-location of Internet hosts, a number of network centric solutions have been proposed and evaluated (see, e.g., J. A. Muir and P. van Oorschot, “Internet geolocation and evasion” Carleton University, School of Computer Science, Ottawa, ON, Canada, Tech. Rep. TR-06-05, 2006). However, these techniques yield a location granularity which may, at its best, provide for the identification of an enterprise campus. Operating on logical IP addresses, they are not capable of actually identifying a located entity.
For large heterogeneous enterprise environments, we consider the above-mentioned alternatives valid only for certain administrative subdomains but either not feasible or not providing enough coverage or precision at the global level. We observe that, in spite of its business potential, an industry applicable solution to automate the physical location discovery of enterprise IT assets is lacking. Particularly, current processes are incapable of providing up-to-date location meta-data of sufficient granularity and in an appropriate spatial reference system, whereas proposed automations either require target device instrumentation and thus neglect unauthorized devices or rely on wireless access and thus neglect other network access methods.